On 17 May 1969 Leonard Bernstein ended his 12-year run as musical director of the New York Philharmonic with a performance of Mahler’s Third. The next night he went to see Jimi Hendrix play Madison Square Gardens. And there you have him. Was Bernstein a fragile romantic or a firebrand rocker? Was he the spiritual visionary who gave us Chichester Psalms or the tin-pan-alley tunesmith behind West Side Story?
Bernstein went to his grave claiming it was possible to be all these things and more — insisting that you could be a political activist and a concert pianist, a conductor of the challengingly atonal and a writer of the melodically unforgettable. Not everyone was convinced. There were, and are, critics who believe that Bernstein’s facility and fecundity was mere dilettantism. Allen Shawn’s suave new biography hopes to give them pause.
Bernstein was a child prodigy, talking before he was 18 months old, picking out tunes on an aunt’s piano from the moment it fetched up in his parents’ Boston home.
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